The CIRCLE project explores the effects of the ongoing economic and demographic changes on: 1) the intergenerational distribution of income and 2) the intra-household informal insurance of care and income risks in Europe. The project provides new cross-country empirical evidence on the impact of the interaction between economic and demographic changes and welfare systems on the distribution of resources, rights and responsibilities between generations. In many European countries welfare provisions addressed to older people are pay-as-you-go financed and fast population ageing boosts redistribution from the young to the old. However, compensatory mechanisms redistributing resources in the opposite direction, i.e. from the old to the young, are often implemented at intra-household level. The analysis takes under-researched redistributive flows into account and covers a variety of European welfare state models, giving a strong base for generalizing the results and deriving useful policy implications.
